Introduction
In the Sony phone stable, the Xperia Z is stealing all the limelight at present. However, a little closer to the ground you’ll find the Sony Xperia SP. It’s a mid-range phone that today seems low-key, but would have had eyeballs popping out just a year ago.
The Sony Xperia SP is a phone you can expect to pay £20-odd for a month on contract, making it an upper-mid range mobile.
Sony Xperia SP – Design
A little less design obsessed than the Xperia Z, the Sony Xperia SP is a plastic-bodied phone that, at 10mm thick, doesn’t strive for supermodel-style dimensions. The white version we had a go with has a largely inoffensive, plain design – apart from one part.
Like some previous Sony phones, the Sony Xperia SP has a transparent plastic lip at the handset’s bottom, through which an LED shines. When you’re playing music, this will match the colour of what’s on-screen. It’s pure fluff, of course, but also acts as a nice way to relay notifications. 
Sony Xperia SP –Screen
With a 4.6-inch screen, the Sony Xperia SP display is a little smaller than today’s flagships – several of which have 5-inch screens. Sticking with the mid-range theme, its resolution is 720p, rather than the 1080p you get with an Xperia Z.
However, 720p offers more than enough pixels to make images and text look super-sharp. The only negative comment is that the display itself didn’t seem to be of particularly remarkable quality – contrast and viewing angles were just decent, rather than excellent. This may have been affected by the dodgy lighting of Sony’s demo area, though.
Sony Xperia SP – Software
Looking a bit deeper than surface level, the Sony Xperia SP runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and sports a custom user interface similar to that seen on Sony’s other Android phones. It’s slick and serious rather than cute and cartoonish.
It’s also packed with Sony extras, including Sony’s Unlimited video and music portals. We imagine many people will ignore these, though, and the main thing is that the UI doesn’t add too much animated bloat to slow Android down. The phone uses a dual-core Snapdragon 1.7GHz CPU with an Adreno 320 GPU and 1GB of RAM. Not top-end, but not bad either.
Sony Xperia SP – Cameras
Its software may be up to date with this year’s phones, but the camera smacks of an upper-tier 2012 phone – although that’s hardly a bad thing. The Sony Xperia SP uses an 8-megapixel main sensor, which may be the same one used in many Samsung Galaxy S3s. We’ll have to wait for our review unit to see what sort of shots it takes, though. The secondary camera is a lowly VGA model.
Sony Xperia SP – First Impressions
With a dual-core processor and less-than-skinny body, the Sony Xperia SP isn’t going to turn anywhere near as many heads as the Xperia Z. But it’s not meant to. This is a more down-to-earth phone for those who don’t want to fork out top dollar. Our only concern is whether it’s quite cheap enough, with retailers suggesting it’ll cost £329.99 SIM-free.
